My parents in 1943.
This week would have been my parents’ 75th wedding anniversary.
Just one day after their marriage ceremony in Newton, Kansas, they left for Paraguay, South America, to be medical missionaries. They founded and ran a leprosy compound, treated the poorest of the poor, and revolutionized how leprosy is treated on the planet today.
But that’s not what I want to tell you about today.
When I was a child, one of eight, my parents were too busy doing the Lord’s work to spend much time with us. Their heroic leprosy work and the Mennonite church that was their bedrock represented powerful forces that demanded their time and seemed to pull them away from us.
Then I grew up, married, had two kids, successfully established a professional career, divorced, and divorced again…I became too busy to spend much time with my parents.
Is this the way it is in other families, I wonder? Isn’t there a song about this… when you comin’ home, Dad I don’t know when?
It wasn’t until my kids were nearly grown that my parents and I learned to know each other. We had long conversations about love, life and loss. My mother shared with me how difficult the first few years of their marriage had been for her. How gruff my father had been.
They both talked to me about how blessed they were that God had led them to Paraguay to be of service.
I felt blessed that I’d had the chance to get to know them so well.
“You’re our writer,” they’d say. “Maybe someday you’ll write our story.”
My parents left behind many diaries, letters, articles and books, invaluable for the book my husband Ed and I are now writing about their remarkable lives.
“Listen to this,” Ed said today, looking up from my mother’s diary:
July 13, 1994. I couldn’t sleep last night, even after taking my ‘helper’ [that’s what she called the sleeping pills she sometimes took]. It felt like a dark satanic cloud was pushing down on me. I feel so guilty about not being there for my children, especially the girls. I failed them when they were young and needed me.
I wiped tears from my eyes. “I never knew that.”
There is so much I don’t know about my own parents. While they were alive I just wasn’t interested enough to ask them the questions that would have provided the perspective I now wish I had.
With John and Clara Schmidt (Marlena’s parents) the situation is very different. She did invest in meaningful conversations with them toward the end of their lives. In addition an extensive written record exists about them in libraries and from them in the many personal documents they left behind.
While I was fortunate enough know them personally for several years toward the end of their lives I am now coming to know them so much better as we dig into the records they left behind.
These very unusual adventuresome people offer us a way of seeing live well worth the effort required to come to know them.
that is quite sad